Kyrgyzstan esimde kalyt

Oh, Kyrgyzstan. The recent events there force me to think again of the nine months I spent in Bishkek in 1994, and the other three months I was there in 1996. I remember looking out the window of one of my eight apartments and seeing the statue of Manas outside the Filkharmoniia; trying to get directions in a city that was changing all the soviet-era street names without actually putting up signs; the hitchhiking Lenin statue just down the street from the Belyi Dom/Ak Uy/White House; taking my life in my hands by eating shashlyk, plov, manty, ashliam fu purchased from street vendors; drinking kymys (fermented mare's milk -- not much to add about that). So much hope, so much promise . . . so much delusion in the Switzerland of Central Asia.

I admit, I shared in that delusion in '94, for a while. Hell, with Karimov in Uzbekistan, Nazarbaev and a restive Russian north in Kazakstan, Turkmenbashy in Turkmenistan, and utter chaos in Tajikistan, how could little Akaev not look good? A physicist from Moscow, untouched by the politics of Soviet Kirgiziia, who spoke Russian fluently and Kyrgyz . . . well, rather not. I remember seeing him on stage with Karimov in '94: the Uzbek "president" was larger, more ebullient, and just a better speaker than Askar. Karimov spouted bullshit with equal fluidity in Russian and Uzbek, clapping Askar on the back, telling jokes (I think: my grasp of the languages was pretty thin for humor, but everybody else laughed). Then, well, Akaev spoke, much as a high school valedictorian might (David Skelton, where are you?), ponderously plodding through a speech in Russian, and then torturing us with a halting translation in Kyrgyz.

Of course, in Bishkek, Russian was just more common. I had gone there on the strength of an intensive three-month course in Uzbek, and given that Kyrgyz is to Uzbek as, say, Italian is to Mexican Spanish, I thought I could get by. But no. There was the occasional pidginizing of Russian and Kyrgyz, but most city dwellers preferred Russian. Whenever I asked for prices in Kyrgyz at the bazaar, I was always answered in Russian.

Hardly surprising, given that Kirgiziia was a net recipient of all-union transfers under the Soviet system -- sort of like a backward southern state in the U.S., receiving more in federal aid than it contributes in federal taxes. The Soviets were also masters at playing nationalities against each other (z.B., Uzbeks and Kyrgyz), and playing the urban dwellers against the rural. The urbanites considered themselves Russian, or at least Soviet, which was always more or less Russian. The station break music on the local state-owned radio was a nifty little tune that we ex-pats assumed was the national anthem. It took me a long time to learn that it was "Moskovkykh vecherakh" -- a Russian song about evenings in Moscow. Hell, Akaev led an audience in one of his speeches in a rousing rendition of the song. Kyrgyz nationalism? Um, yeah.

Meanwhile, outside the capital, Russian rapidly deteriorated: I met shepherds outside of Talas who thought I was a Muscovite, and refused to believe that I was not a native speaker of Russian. At an ulak competition outside of Bishkek, an old Kyrgyz guy advanced on me threateningly, demanding aggressively of my Kyrgyz host (Marat Asanaliev, kaektasyz?) at the event why he'd brought a Russian. When my host told the man that I was American, the man looked confused and wandered away.

And, of course, in Osh, site of bloody riots in 1990 or so -- didn't really matter when, because when I was there in '94, after a grueling 25-hour bus ride through the mountains (and a tedious couple of hours at the Uzbek border, while the driver and the border guards haggled over the bribe), the Uzbeks and Kyrgyz inhabitants still looked at each other as though they might draw knives at any minute. It didn't help that Uzbeks carry knives on their belts anyway, although the blades aren't good for much besides buttering bread. Uzbeks generally put their hands on their chest when expressing pleasantries, and the Kyrgyz (half-)joked that they did this because their hearts were black.

Still, Kyrgyz always referred me to Uzbeks if I wanted good plov, or pilav, or pilow, or (as we in the States call it) pilaf. Uzbeks for plov and manty, Russians for pel'meny, Uighurs or Dungans for ashliam-fu, Koreans for kimchi -- when I asked what the Kyrgyz cooked well, the speakers would shrug and smile. Not surprising, when the national dish was besh barmak ("five fingers", so called because it was eaten without utensils), boiled sheep innards served over noodles. But, again: Kyrgyz nationalism? Um. . . .

(incidentally, I have heard, but never verified, that "um" means . . . um . . . female naughty bits in Kyrgyz.)

Anyway, the politics. Akaev seemed to get along okay, not hurt by the fact that the USAID and UN were just pouring money into the economy. There were some shaky moments, of course. Early in his administration, Akaev had said that the Kyrgyz economy would be strong and diversified, including the export of opium. . . . He also had to rapidly backpedal when he announced that the state langauge of Kyrgyzstan would be Kyrgyz: to keep the Russian professionals from fleeing in droves, he hastily added Russian as coequal with Kyrgyz. Then, a few months before I left, Akaev dissolved parliament for new elections, a sign that maybe things weren't so . . . um . . . oh, fuck it.

When I went back in '96, I was an intern at the Ministerstvo Innostrannykh Del'/Tyshky Ishter Ministeriasi/Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which was under the control of Minister Roza Otunbaeva, former ambassador to the U.S. I had actually met her in 1994, when one of her younger relatives (the Kyrgyz were not always so careful in distinguishing "little sister" from "niece" or "cousin") was in the ESL class I taught, and when I arrived in 1996, owing to a screw-up with my fellow intern (Matt Bergstrom, where are you?), I stayed the first night with her family. Anyway, that was all largely irrelevant, because Akaev had pulled foreign policy completely into a sort of auxiliary administration. So . . . the ministry was basically spinning its wheels, keeping busy. Anvar, Jyldyz, Marat, Samargul' (Borbieva, who had helped arrange my '94 visa), Ainora, Ainura, Erkin -- kak u vas, y'all? Salomatsingarby? Cyngarnyng ishteringer barmy? Vashy raboty kak?

Economically, things weren't looking so good. Although the gasoline shortage of '94 had ended (decreasing air quality and making street-crossing considerably more dangerous), USAID was looking at pulling out in a couple of years, the Canadian mining companies were bitching about the bureaucrats at every level of government taking their cuts. In '94 I had seen doctors, engineers, and other professionals selling possessions (and sometimes purchases from Moscow or Istanbul) on blankets on the sidewalks; I had seen women standing, each with a cake in her hands, waiting to sell it so she could go back and bake another one and come right back out there. The factories had closed, and the men who worked them were unemployed, while their wives, who had studied such feminine fields as linguistics were getting paid skads of money to be translators and office administrators for the foreign firms. So, in many cases, the husbands would drink (it was said that the Russians taught the Kyrgyz how to drink, but never taught them how to stop) and be general layabouts, the wives would kick them out and support their families, their parents and/or siblings, and even their husbands, whose apartments the wives financed. Many urbanites had dachas in the countryside; basically little huts where they could grow vegetables that they canned for the winter.

I guess I could go on like this forever (and, I guess in internet terms, I kind of already have), but I should probably call it quits here. I would like to say howdy to a bunch of folks I knew over there, although I have no reason to think that any of them is reading this, any more than anybody else. But I have to hope that they're all doing okay, that they have means of support and are happy, and that the events in the little republic haven't harmed them. Vsego dobrogo, moi druky; jakshy kalyngar, dosttorum!

unfinished business

Ach, so much to write, so little time. Plus, I get priority paralysis from the sheer quantity of stupid issues out there:

-- Social Security: kill it! (and Medicare, too)
-- Schiavo: if there are resources in her name to continue her life, let her live. If there aren't, well, she doesn't have the right to anyone else's property to sustain her life.
-- gay marriage: why the hell is the state involved in marriage at all? Shouldn't the individual decide what constitutes a desirable relationship? ANYONE WHO SUPPORTS THE AMENDMENT TO "PROTECT" MARRIAGE IS AN ANTI-AMERICAN SUBHUMAN!
-- Bush is not spreading democracy in the Middle East, any more than Reagan destroyed the Soviet Union -- all of these thing are dependent on factors external as well as internal to U.S. action. Besides, democracy in the Middle East is really the last thing we want.
-- Why is it a state matter whether some athletes use drugs? Get Congress the hell out of baseball and anything else the Constitution didn't authorize them to meddle in!
-- And when the hell did we become a parliamentary democracy? The President as the most powerful member of his party? The President setting a legislative agenda? The President spending my #$&*@ money to campaign for other members of his party? The executive and legislative branches of government are supposed to be antagonists, each blocking the other from overreaching its authority. Oy! If y'all aren't going to vote for candidates willing to limit the scope of government, at least vote one party for Congress and another for President.

More on all of these later.

Income taxes suck -- support H.J. Res. 16!

So I just finished my federal and state income tax returns, and I am vividly reminded of just how detestible income taxes are. It's not just the money: I recognize the need to provide funds for the maintenance of government and the services it provides -- the amount being a matter of political debate. Rather, it's the amount of time, effort, and stress it takes to complete one's return. The handy little statistics in the Reduction of Paperwork Act section of the 1040 booklet indicates that I could expect to spend about 20 hours researching, preparing, and filling out the forms that I had to file. That, of course, does not include all the time required to research all the other forms one might need to file, or the double- and triple-checking one must do to avoid the appearance of fraud. It's infuriating to jump through all those hoops; enter, subtract, multiply, take the lesser, take the greater -- all in some labyrinthine stroll through the mess that special interests and short-sightedness has made of the federal income tax code. And, of course, the IRS has powers that distort or overthrow completely due process: seizure of property before conviction of tax fraud, for example. It is worth noting that those of us who make honest mistakes are much more vulnerable to abuse of this power than those using professionals to file fraudulent returns. So I can either spend a full work-week making sure there are no mistakes in my forms (and that I'm getting all the deductions I can possibly get), or I can pay somebody else to take that liability and effort.

And what a distraction it is, isn't it? Looking through pages of documentation to find that one little deduction that can save you $2 on your taxes, completing worksheet after worksheet, stringing together receipts and good-faith recollections to fit the requirements. Like rats running a maze, getting a little pleasure-zap when we complete it. It's enough to make us forget how odious it all is. The social engineering: charity, energy-efficient vehicles, having kids. That last one's the most bizarre: children use resources that all of us have to pay for, so why do we exempt those people who have the children and therefore necessitate the expense from paying their share of it? It's like the idiots out here who decided to exempt old people from paying about half of their property tax, just because they're old and have lived in their property for 10 years or more. Okay, so if I live in my house for 10 years, lose my job, and can't pay my property taxes, why should I be penalized for being only in my 40s? Why should I have to pay effectively more in taxes because of the junk they don't have to pay?

And that's the other thing, right? This loathsome temptation to blame the rich, or the poor, or the old, or the young, or the childless, or the . . . childful, for obliging us to pay more taxes -- it's class warfare, courtesy of the cowards in the legislature.

If you think I'm advocating a flat tax here, you're wrong, because the ultimate problem with income tax is that it makes the government's business how much I earn (and spend, and on what). All the government needs to know about me to protect my rights is that I exist, who I am, and what I own -- and that last, really, only the local government needs to know. This massive infrastructure for managing payroll deductions, 1099s, etc. is a drain on our economy (sorry, H&R Block), diverting funds from productive pursuits to those that merely generate wealth. What we must do is repeal the 16th Amendment and end direct taxation of individuals by the federal government once and for all.

I should note that I'm not as incensed about corporate income taxes, because publicly-traded corporations have to provide income/expense information to their shareholders anyway, and privately-held corporations still derive the benefit of being corporations. I mean, there is a reason individuals incorporate: to limit individual liability. The resulting corporation is not an individual, but an entity that exists only in the commercial (and therefore legal) sphere. It does not have the rights that the individuals incorporating do, and taxing the corporation is therefore no more odious than determining its income and profit. Corporate income taxes still could use some reform, though, if not outright repeal.

Anyway, replacing the personal income tax revenue is easy enough: the federal government conducts a census every ten years to find out who's living where, and how old everybody is, so determining how many legally voting citizens are in each state. From this, the federal government can apportion the taxes necessary to meet those expenses, and the states can raise that money through whatever means makes sense. A raw study of the 2000 census and budget shows that, to make up the $864 billion in personal income tax revenues, every citizen of all ages would have had to pay $3,070.12 each; or only those 18 and older would've had to pay $4,131.44 each. I know that's a tax increase for everyone making less than $30,000 or so (as I was in 1990). It would therefore be necessary to, you know, cut government spending. I know the IRS would cost a lot less if we were apportioning by state -- one guy with a clipboard could track receipts by state. Killing Social Security and Medicare -- and these programs MUST DIE -- wouldn't save any money, per se, but they would end the odious burden of the most regressive tax in U.S. history on individuals. Strictly limiting the federal government to that domain explicated in the U.S. Constitution, and the resultant elimination of departments unnecessary for that domain, would save enough money to make the per capita tax on citizens less than a few hundred dollars per year -- pennies a day, as an ad might say.

Interestingly enough, there's a bill in the House that would repeal the 16th amendment, introduced by Iowa Rep. Steve King introduced H.J. Res. 16 on 1 Feb 2005 (cosponsored by Reps. Culberson, Johnson, and Linder). It's currently in the Subcommittee on the Constitution, where a similar bill (which also explicitly limited federal governmental authority to those areas specified in the Constitution) from Texas Rep. Ron Paul languished and died during 2001. Hey, I have an idea: since all those subhuman, anti-American, Bushophiles are so hot and ready to change the Constitution anyway, why don't we get them to support this amendment and individual rights, rather than presuming to intrude upon personal relationships.

Law

In "Morality", I tried to lay out a basic statement of morality -- not the most or best a person could do or act, but rather, the absolute minimum that every individual should follow: "Refrain from doing that which, if practiced by everybody in the community, would cause to happen to another individual that which you would not want to happen to you." In this discussion about law, I must modify this statement, because law is inherently different from morality.

Law exists to protect individuals by blocking or punishing the behavior of other individuals. It therefore must be underlaid with force, because the logical limit of preventing or punishing any action is force against the individual carrying it out. It is absolutely essential to bear in mind that a law is permission for the agent of that law to physically harm or even kill you. YOU. Just think: if you violate a law, the police will seek to detain you. If you resist, the police will respond with sufficient force to overcome your resistance. The logical limit of that is the death either of the police officers involved or of YOU. That means we must be protected from the law as well as by it. In a society of law, all individuals are equally bound by the law, so we must make sure that there are only so many laws as are absolutely necessary to protect us -- otherwise we may be inconvenienced, harmed, or even killed for the enforcement of something that does not protect us or anyone else from the same.

In understanding why law must be limited, there's another concept that is almost uniquely American: that individuals are not knowable. No one among us can read minds, or intentions, or look into another's soul (whatever that means), and there is no way to verify claims of such ability by any individual. In "premiere" I talked a little about knowledge of an idea as requiring disproof of all alternatives to that idea. It is possible, of course, to assign a reasonable probability to an individual's ability to read minds, but history and our own experience demonstrate that such abilities, even if they do exist, have never been shown as reliable. For practical purposes, we cannot know if an individual claiming awareness of another individual's thoughts is true, a misconception by the claimant, or an outright lie. We, and everybody else, can only come to trust or have confidence in an individual by observing or learning about that individual's actions. Given that individuals can act in ways that deceive us as to their true "nature" (whatever that means), we can never be sure that any individual we know won't become an axe murderer. The American understanding of this, evident in the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, is that we can not know that any individual will use power wisely or well. Although there are real differences in the morality, nature, intentions, what have you of various individuals, each person represents a black box we cannot penetrate. Therefore, a lot like the status of Schrodinger's Cat, the morality, wisdom, intelligence, and other qualities of an individual are not known unless and until we open the box. From this we must conclude that any person in power is capable of error or malice, and therefore any of us is vulnerable to an uneven application of the law because of such error or malice.

This bears repeating, because so many persons in our society just don't get it. Just because you never take drugs, or commit sodomy, or speed, doesn't mean that somebody can't claim that you have taken drugs, committed sodomy, or sped. Someone could be mistaken in sense and memory, or could just hate you so much that they'll lie about it. Can anyone reading this say that NOBODY hates him? As another example, what does it take to be a "suspected terrorist"? Just for the right person to suspect or claim to suspect that you are a terrorist. THAT'S IT! There are a lot of other reasons why George W. Bush is the worst and most dangerous president we've ever had, but his insistence on being able to violate YOUR rights on the say-so of just one individual is enough to make him a domestic enemy of the Constitution.

So whereas morality is based on what you think is right, law must be based on what is demonstrably, universally wrong. As with morality, just quoting some allegedly divine source is not sufficient to justify a law, because ANY ONE OF US COULD BE KILLED FOR BEING ACCUSED OF VIOLATING A LAW (I just can't repeat this enough): we must show that a law is required to protect an individual from harm. Let's break this down: just because an individual might feel as though he's been harmed doesn't mean he's been harmed: the harm must be objectively demonstrable; just because an individual can be demonstrably harmed doesn't mean we need a law: the law must be demonstrably effective in preventing that action. A law is only justified if it demonstrably protects real people from demonstrable harm.

Only the individual can be assumed to have rights. The necessity of this is self-evident: only an individual can act and be held accountable for action. Corporations, governments, groups do not act: agents of them act. The weather may act, the sun and moon and meteors may cause damage, but they cannot be held accountable. Only individuals therefore are sovereign: that is, they have both authority and culpability. God may act, but His actions are not demonstrably His: prove that the wind is not caused by an angry wind god in argument with an angry cloud god, or that invisible blue monkeys are not the ones moving us about like puppets. Therefore God, religion, culture, language, groups -- none of these have sovereignty, nor therefore do they either have rights or the need of protection of same. It is not clear to me how any individual can be moral without being sovereign, and I think the law must grant this sovereignty not only to protect individuals, but to facilititate their being moral. At any rate, it is this sovereignty that must be protected: sovereignty over person and property. Locke talked about inalienable rights as though we were somehow imbued with them, but we all know that we have no rights that those with power do not recognize. Rather, to be considered just and worthy of existence, the state must assume these rights. Because we have sovereignty, we must assume responsibility for and face the consequences of our own actions -- the state must not attempt to protect us from them, because it deprives us of liberty, even the liberty to screw up. Also because we have sovereignty, the state must not protect us from being persuaded to assent to an action. However, an individual must be prevented from using force or fraud to violate another's sovereignty. And because we're talking about real rights here, we must dispense with subjective measurement of those: no mental anguish, pain and suffering, sensibilities or decendy, or whatever. If there is harm to person, it must be demonstrable and quantifiable (medical costs to repair such harm are a good indicator); harm to property must be more substantial than "property value". At the same time, though, diminishing the utility of the property, through pollution, noise, or even bright, inescapable light is quantifiable: through concentration of particles, decibels of sound, or candela of light.

It is the state, as the creator and enforcer of law (through individuals so authorized), that has the responsibility of protecting the sovereignty of the individual. But because this responsibility is underlaid with the power to HARM OR KILL ANY ONE DEFIES IT, and because the individuals authorized to use this power are equally susceptible to error or malic, the responsibility, both in laws and enforcement of them, must be limited to the demonstrable protection of real individuals from demonstrable harm by other individuals.

Which brings us to the presumption of innocence. This is another necessary fiction: we are presumed to be potentially guilty the moment we are suspects, but the maintenance of an equal presumption of potential innocence is necessary to keep us from getting, well, beaten up or killed just because somebody thinks or claims we did something illegal. Thus we must prevent those in authority from doing to any accused individual anything we ourselves would not put up with to help solve a crime and demonstrate our innocence. The police protect us, so we must be willing to stop what we're doing and assist a police officer out of the reasonable expectation that such is necessary to protect us, protect somebody else, or find someone who has wronged somebody else. We also should be willing to take time out from work or whatever to go to the police station and answer questions or give testimony, again out of the reasonable expectation of that action's necessity. If we are falsely accused and arrested, we must be willing to be detained and imprisoned for the time required to prove our innocence, but this is predicated on a reasonable expectation that we will not suffer harm to ourselves or our property as a result, that our liberty shall not be constrained for an unreasonable time, and that we shall be compensated when we are exonerated. But this last expectation rests on the necessity of treating all those accused in the same way: no beatings, no confiscations, no killing. And, of course, because individuals in a jury are susceptible to error and malice, it remains possible that a convicted individual is innocent -- BECAUSE IT IS POSSIBLE THAT ANY ONE OF US CAN BE FALSELY ACCUSED, UNFAIRLY TRIED, AND WRONGFULLY CONVICTED. That means YOU! On this possibility rests my objection to the death penalty, and my support of the Libertarian party position that individuals who are exonerated must be compensated for any and all infringements of liberty and property.

Given all the things that can happen to YOU, it just doesn't make sense to authorize individuals in government to use their power unless somebody's going to be, is being, or has been, harmed. Prostitution? Drug use? Pornography? Individual sovereignty reigns: unless there's force or fraud involved, government should stay the hell out of them. Homosexuality? Ditto. The status of English? It's just a language, so it has no sovereignty to protect. God? I tell you what: not only does the government have no right to make a statement about God, one cannot presume fair treatment by a state or agent thereof who does. This post already quite long, so I'll just say this: anyone who thinks we are one nation "under God", that our laws are based on the Ten Commandments (one of three possible versions), and that our currency should proclaim a belief in God is STUPID, SUBHUMAN, and ANTI-AMERICAN. But I'm sure I'll talk about that in another post.

So all this is why law and government must be limited, and why I get so incensed at government actions or calls for government action that exceeds these limits. So now I guess I can start posting specific gripes. Allons-y!

Morality

One of the things that kind of irritates me about a lot of theists is that they seem to believe that only by believing in their God can one be virtuous. Take a look at the first edicts of the three major monotheistic religions: "You shall have no other gods before me"; "love the Lord God with all your heart, all you mind, and all your soul"; "There is no god but God". Normative religion places a political statement above respect for life or even common decency. It would seem to me that not only is the morality of such theists empty, relying on a mythical being rather than reasoned understanding of causality and human welfare, but it's also unreliable: who knows what a true believer is going to believe God wants him to do? I think it's pretty obvious that most theists deviate from orthodoxy in some way, even if they are fully aware of what the orthodoxy is. What makes some things in the Bible the WORD OF GOD, and other things cultural relics? On what basis to true believers make the distinction? With that in mind, how can anyone be sure that one of these fools won't decide that you, or me, or somebody else is deserving of a tongue-lashing or, say, having his "lamp put out" for some thing that he believes is a sin?

A universal morality must be based in the real, the objective, that which requires faith only in the reality of the world to accept. Morality is first and foremost about how one treats other humans, and maybe other real beings like animals and plants. As one Catholic priest noted, Christian behavior begins not in the pew, but in the parking lot. It is obvious in such a view that an action is most usefully judged on the basis of that action's effects on other individuals -- simply quoting the Bible, or the Quran, or some obscure scroll or popular speaker is not sufficient. Knowing the effects of an action, we best determine whether those effects are desirable based on enlightened self-interest and empathy.

Self-interest predates just about all other conceptions. It starts when we're born, and we become acquainted with the various discomforts of life -- and, if we're lucky, alleviation of those discomforts. We all learn that it sucks to be hungry or thirsty, to have mushy poop in our diapers, or to be tired and unable to sleep. We all learn a preference to being handled gently and spoken to soothingly over being shaken or hit, or being yelled at. Long after we learn those preferences (relatively speaking), we learn that one or two individuals act to make us feel either better or worse. From all of this we learn what kind of behavior -- what we learn is called love -- we deserve. This sets up our barometer of what good behavior is, although at the time we think only in terms of behavior towards us. If we receive good behavior, we can view ourselves as valuable individuals deserving of good behavior. If we are mistreated, we can come to view ourselves as deserving only of such behavior. Further, we must move from self-interest to enlightened self-interest: just because we want to eat a quart of ice cream doesn't mean we should, to use a crude example.

Empathy is next thing we learn. The first moral question many of us hear is "How would you feel if somebody did that to you?" When we understand it, we also understand that other individuals are as deserving as we of whatever behavior we have come to identify as good behavior. If all we've known is mistreatment, it is likely that we will feel it appropriate to mistreat others. Most of us, however, learn that if we don't like something to happen to us, we shouldn't cause it to happen to someone else. We are also vulnerable, at this stage, to expecting other people to like or dislike the same things as we do, which when applied to big questions leads to things like inquisitions (I mean, I would want someone to burn the sin out of me to save my immortal soul; fortunately I have no sin, but if I did. . . .) and really bad birthday gifts. What we learn to do over time is identify specifically what we like and don't like, to better predict what somebody else will like or not like. For example, masochists don't like simply pain, but receiving pain under controlled circumstances to which they tacitly agree. Or, more subtly, Christians don't really want to live according to the Word of God, but rather what they conceive of as the Word of what they conceive of as God. Understanding that enables us to avoid perhaps the most basic evil: invalidating another person's experiences and will by presuming it to be no different from our own. Of course, if we never learn empathy, the welfare of others is irrelevant.

The next moral quality is the recognition of causality, which comes through experience -- empirical analysis and reason, if you will. It allows one to avoid doing that which would cause to happen to somebody else what one would not want to have happen to one's self, Refraining from such action is the most basic and necessary kind of morality. And if empathy is not enough to encourage one to refrain from harming another, enlightened self-interest should remind us that what comes around does indeed come around: those wronged by us seek to avenge themselves against us, just as we would seek against those wronging us. Awareness of our actions makes others more or less likely to trust us, making life within the community more or less difficult. Of course, the legal system is also a good stick, but far more subtle consequences should be enough to make us reconsider an action that could harm another. Although we live in a time that imposes on each of us an almost disturbing anonymity, none of us is invisible. That allows us to avoid Plato's question about the morality of the individual whose actions are not perceived. Again, though, a well-calibrated barometer of good treatment coupled with proper empathy should suffice even in the lack of consequences.

With these three ingredients, one can develop a simple but readily applicable statement of morality. The Golden Rule ("do unto others as you would have them do unto you") is reasonably good, but it leaves one vulnerable to the bad birthday gift error. Because of this, as a basic statement of morality I prefer "refrain from doing unto others that which you would not have them do unto you." Or "an ye harm none, do what ye will" (because "these words the Wiccan Rede fulfill"). It has an advantage over the Golden Rule of being a negative, "do not" statement. I would add another layer of morality: a communal component. That is, "refrain from doing that which, if practiced by everybody else, would cause to happen to others what you would not have happen to you". Using resources recklessly, or exploiting loopholes in the letter of a law, or following too closely in traffic, or always taking from the penny jar instead of giving; such actions would violate that principle. To be truly moral, however, one must be highly aware of reality and causality. Most of the vexing moral infringements we experience during the day are the result simply of inattention (except for those jackasses who play music on their car stereos with basslines and sub-woofers strong enough to shake cars in adjacent lanes and be heard two apartment complexes and a park away. Bastards.). At any rate, the above statements of morality place the analysis where it belongs: on understanding what's good for others as well as ourselves, and what causes the good and the bad, rather than what a mythical being may or may not have said. More simply put: no god required.

Bear in mind that I'm not painting all theists, or Christians, with the same brush: enlightened individuals don't let God or Scripture get in the way of morality. I also recognize that religion has the value of providing moral teaching to persons who lack the ability to conceptualize complicated causality or subtly empathize with others: a few "thou shalt not's and a Santa Claus figure is all these folks need. Karma is a good illustration of abstract or diffuse consequences; so's three-fold retribution. But they are not necessary, again, focus on what's important, lest we be duped into doing the wrong thing by someone who convinces us that God wants us to. That leads to true morality, which is found in looking at reality, and the welfare of others, rather than the commandments of God.

premiere

Well, I've finally done it. The posts that follow shall relate my various and innumerable gripes with contemporary politics -- but, of course, as Lenin observed, everything is politics, so I guess I'm leaving myself open to branch out into music or television or whatever. But let me start with my take on rational analysis, because I'll be using and bitching about other sources' uses of the following words as I go forward. This isn't a deep epistemological treatise, just an explanation of how I'll be evaluating information.

There are three basic levels awareness, for want of a better term: faith/belief, trust/confidence, and knowledge.

The lowest and least useful of these is faith or belief, which is essentially the acceptance of an assertion or idea without consideration of evidence -- either evidence against it or a lack of evidence supporting it. To believe or have faith is a conscious decision to shut off all further rational analysis of the idea, and is therefore useful only when there's no possibility of evidence. If an idea or assertion can be examined rationally, faith must be abandoned.

Knowledge is the highest level of awareness, being the acceptance of an idea or assertion on the basis of demonstrable elimination of all other alternatives. As one might guess, though, this winds up being not especially relevant: humans are finite in sense and memory, and it's just not feasible to locate, examine, and disprove all possible alternative cases of a phenomenon or idea. I may be paraphrasing Vico, but the only things we can know are those things we can create: definitions, mathematics. Of course, what we know by definition may not have any relevance at all to the nature of the world. So knowledge can be employed only in limited cases.

What we're left with is trust or confidence, which I would define as an assignment of probability to the veracity of an idea or asssertion based on previous experience with the phenomenon described or the source relating the assertion -- we talk, for example, about someone "earning' our trust. This is the basis on which we examine the world, and it is dynamic because new information about a phenomenon must change our level of certainty about any assertions or ideas related to it. It implies continued rational thought and analysis on the assertion, and depends on evidence.

I consider myself a materialist, empiricist, and scientist: I believe that the world exists apart from my perception of it, but that it yields to my perception. I must believe this, because I could locate or derive no evidence that could challenge or support this assertion. In fact, it might be less proper to say that I believe the world is real than that I hope it is (hope being the expression of a preference for a given outcome with understanding that such outcome is not the only or even most likely outcome). In accepting this premise on faith, however, I can use my senses to gather evidence about the world around me, and I have no need to believe anything else. My senses are not infallible, nor is my memory, but they can be bolstered by repetition and double-checking perceptions with others; and only in this way can my perception of reality begin to become valid. I think (trust or have confidence that) all humans, and all sentient creatures, are empirical by nature, because it is through empiricism that we learn to walk, use depth perception and location of sound, use language, read expression -- only after a vast amount of information is acquired in this way can we actually learn through abstraction.

So by way of summation, I get impatient with persons who say "I believe" when they really mean they have a high degree of confidence, and I get livid with persons who say "I know" when they really mean they believe. Politics is rife with examples, so I'll refer to this over and over again.